"The Faces and Facets of Freedom"
Theme Group Show at Oxford Gallery
267 Oxford Street, Rochester, NY
Walk into the Oxford Gallery to enjoy the theme show "The Faces and Facets of Freedom". It is a wistful goodbye to our community. Not that we are saying goodbye to freedom in this moment of political turmoil, but for our community we must know that the Oxford Gallery will be closing. Great thanks must go out to Jim and Ginny Hall who have steered this ship for over these past 30+ years! Being an active agent in the visual art scene here in Rochester is a real achievement! We know it is a lot of work to run an art gallery and requires a serious commitment.
Paula Crawford's painting of the Statue of Liberty greets you in the gallery. "Lady Liberty" is an oil on canvas, and I was pleased to see the interesting color patterns in Paula's artwork. On this occasion, I was reminded of visiting this monument when I was a little kid with my family ( and then we were allowed to walk up flights of stairs to view the harbor and the New York City skyline from a perch in the Lady's Crown! ).
Theme shows like this one have been a feature of the Oxford Gallery schedule for years, and I have the feeling that Jim and Ginny enjoyed the idea of giving creatives a prompt that would inspire artists to conjure up some interesting results. Each individual artist in this case would have a different approach to the concept of "Freedom", and the visitor to the gallery might then find some of the works in this exhibition to be a bit provocative, especially the paintings by Thomas Insalaco.
"This Is Not A Banana" oil on canvas
Thomas Insalaco
Often in group exhibitions like this one in Rochester, I tend to look at the paintings and sometimes the sculptures get overlooked. That is not the case with the bright piece by Olivia Kim that commemorates the great respect we have in our area for Frederick Douglass.
Olivia Kim's Frederick Douglass statuette
With a theme like "Facets of Freedom", a viewer can project themselves into a situation like the one portrayed in David Dorsey's painting, "Saturday Morning". Here, he shows an engaging family moment, with kids having fun, enjoying a sunny day, and this all puts me in a good mood!
"Saturday Morning", oil on linen by David Dorsey
Bill Kayser, born in 1936, was a colleague of mine when we were teaching at Rochester Institute of Technology, and it is great to see that he is still being productive. He has two works in this exhibition, the larger one called "Breach" is a kind of collage mounted on the wall. I guess in his case the notion of freedom is embedded in thinking about a greater sense of abstraction without being so literal!
Bill Keyser's "Breach"
Being out in nature is one of my favorite things, so I have a real attraction to an oil painting by Phyllis Bryce Ely in her work called: "Freedom to Roam". This might represent freedom and the couple of Bald Eagles in this show also has that effect. On the other side of this equation of course there is the lack of freedom, and for that we get a sense of restriction and detention found in the quartet paintings by Jim Mott.
"Visiting Omar, ICE Detention, Batavia"
by Jim Mott
Jim Mott's acrylic paintings in various shades of grey set up a contrast bringing us back to the reality of regional politics and the enforcement of the ICE Detention centers.
As the Oxford Gallery closes we can thank all of those people who come out to support the arts, and in my next post I write about the Mercer Gallery at Monroe Community College, and the opening of a large group exhibition for The Print Club of Rochester! So Stay Tuned! I urge you all to go and see the Oxford Gallery before the end of their final show!
